News and Notes

On the MFA Blog a day ago, a poster informed that all the Syracuse acceptance offers have gone out (whether by mail or phonecall is unclear), and there is a waitlist of ten. The poster is on the waitlist and received notification by mail, so it appears that at least the waitlisters will get letters. I've also read a couple of posts of people receiving rejection letters from Syracuse already, so I'm assuming that everyone will receive letters of confirmation or rejection either way in a week or so.

A bit of good news for me. I received an email the other night from the director of Purdue's MFA program informing me that I was still in contention for their program, and asking that I sit tight. It was a very kind email, and very encouraging. In light of what I know about how Purdue selects their candidates (taken from the MFA Faculty Forum I), and in light of my current status, I feel fairly confident in assuming that I've been waitlisted by Purdue, regardless of what happens. At any rate, I'm trying as hard as I can not to count my chickens before all my eggs have hatched. I'm on a prospective list of up to twenty other fiction writers, all contending for about two remaining fiction slots. It's not exactly great odds, especially assuming the greatly elevated level of competition. All I can do at this point is cross my fingers.

** UPDATE **

A vigilant poster on TSE contacted Notre Dame and revealed that "letters (and all MFA-related activity) is running at least two weeks behind schedule." Ack. Someone did indeed post an acceptance on TSE on Monday to Notre Dame by phone call. I'm going to hedge and hypothesize that it is one of those "early" acceptances where the school notifies their top candidate(s) with their best funding package. At any rate, it looks like we're going to be at least a week or two waiting for any further word (acceptances, waitlists, rejections) from Notre Dame. Sit tight.

Purdue's Funding

An excellent post on the MFA Blog on Purdue's funding for their Creative Writing students, which you can find here. Best of all, it's straight from the Associate Director of Purdue's Creative Writing program, so you can pretty much take it as gospel.

As to the stipend amount, $13,000 is definitely livable, and up to $19,000 is downright comfortable. The key is the cost of living in West Lafayette, which is incredibly low. When I was an undergrad at Purdue, I lived in what was considered some very swanky accommodations location-wise (extremely close to campus), and paid barely more than $500 a month. You could easily get into the $400 range if you consider housing off of campus. Plus, everything is cheap. Food is cheap, utilities are cheap, even the bars are cheap. If memory serves me correctly, they have 25-cent beer nights at the Cactus bar on Tuesdays... but don't quote me on that.

It's all nice, if you can get it. Consider Purdue's Creative Writing admission rates in 2007, per Seth Abramson's admissions writeup: 100 applications, 4 acceptances. And that's for Fiction alone. Yikes. That's a 4% acceptance rate in 2007. 2009? Probably lower, to be completely honest. If you just double the amount of applications (something I can see happening very easily), then you're looking at a 2% acceptance rate. Programs like Purdue, which offer stellar funding for their students, have and will continue to get all kinds of press -- the posting on the MFA blog, the large mention in Poets & Writers article, and so on. That Purdue had only gotten 100 applications in 2007 shows how much of an unknown it was just a few years ago, yet how incredibly competitive it was and will still further become.